James Cappleman is running for Alderman in the 46th Ward in Chicago. He also is receiving publicly documented concerns from his constituents via SeeClickFix.

On February 3rd Cappleman announced that he would like to see SeeClickFix integrated into the City of Chicago's business process. While the city can pay for SeeClickFix's pro tools we encourage the City to set-up free watch areas for all of their departments based on keywords.

Cappleman said. “Besides making responses to city services more efficient and
timely, it saves the city money by streamlining the issue straight to the department which
handles this matter. It’s time for our city to move with the times and use technology to improve
the quality of life of our residents.”

We agree with James and decided to help the city of Chicago to take the next step. On the City's website we found lots of great public information like email addresses for city departments: http://cityinfo.cityofchicago.org/PhoneBook/PhoneBook?page=DepartmentWorkGroups

Over the last 20 minutes we created watch areas filtered by appropriate keywords to send alerts to different divisions of Streets and Sanitation. The recipients of the emails, who inevitably know their responsibilities better than us, will be able to tailor those keywords a little more to fit their responsibilities.

Try reporting a pothole or a snow issue in Chicago and let us know the results.
As an example here is the watch area for Graffiti removal: http://seeclickfix.com/watch_area/14782 (We recommend only reporting the graffiti you really want removed...Chicago has some pretty nice street art if you ask the SCF team.)

You can create a watch area here: http://seeclickfix.com/chicago/watch_areas/map